Drool: Eldritch Is Thief Meets Lovecraft Meets Roguelike

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Eldritchjust got announced by former BioShock 2/Borderlands developers David and Kyle Pittman, but it’s already rocketed to the top of my list of Exciting Doodads That I Will (Lovingly) Obliterate With My Excitement Lasers. The headline does not lie. The roguelike-like counts games like Thief and Dishonored among its closest inspirations, bringing them together in a clammy, tentacle-slathered Lovecraftian embrace. In short, you can fight, sure, but you can also stealth past enemies, upgrade otherworldly powers, and climb around the environment to discover alternate paths through the harrowing infini-dungeon. Oh Eldritch, let me count the ways. Wait, I already did. You should probably just watch the (refreshingly silly) trailer, then.

Yeah, I can get behind that – mainly so it’s no longer able to sneak up behind me and slurp out my immortal soul through a silly straw. Here are the things you’ll be doing in Eldritch: Dishonor Of The Rogue Thief (subtitle tentative and also entirely fake):

Unearth ancient secrets and find your way to freedom!

Sneak, fight, and explore strange worlds!

Invoke mystical powers to augment your play style!

Randomly generated levels provide fresh challenges and opportunities!

Unlock shortcuts to jump directly to deeper dungeons!

The Pittmans are also keen to boast “non-linear levels and open-ended play styles,” which they say emerged from their love of Looking Glass games like Thief.

Potential jankiness of combat aside, it all looks positively marvelous, if you ask me. Eldritch is coming out on October 21st, and a preorder will get you into a beta that kicks off at the end of September. Also, it’s currently sneaking and stabbing its way through Steam Greenlight’s treacherous dungeons, if you feel like lending a helping thumb. John’s going to have some impressions of the game up later today. How’s everyone else feeling about it?

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Conversely, I love the art style, so my purchase will cancel out your lack of purchase. This slightly blocky, retro look has so much atmosphere to it, perhaps because it reminds me of those awesome, early 3D Amiga and PC games I loved so much. I’ve been playing Ultima Underworld a lot lately too, so it’s pressing similar “want” buttons.

Well, I only half love the art style which probably balances things out more. I love those low poly monsters but I dislike the environment textures that make the game look like a Minecraft mod. If they changed those and maybe increased the detail in the environments I’d probably be off the fence and firmly in the court.

Certainly Skyrim, Crysis 2 and the Mass Effect series would have also looked better if they weren’t developed with console constraints in mind. Constraints aren’t a thing merely indie developers have to deal with.

Honestly, you can’t call two guys making a game on their own lazy. You just don’t have the knowledge of how much work goes into developing a game to have that opinion. It’s like a redneck from Mississippi saying he doesn’t think there’s enough evidence of climate change to believe it. It’s not just that he’s wrong, but he’s so mindbogglingly stupid that it’s just inappropriate for him to express his opinion and potentially pollute the minds of other people.

You might not like the art style, sure, but please don’t call the developers lazy. They’ve probably worked extremely hard for dubious reward and I’d assume don’t actually have the budget to hire 400 3D artists for a year each, weird right?

This is a discussion about a video game keep your fricking political opinions and straw man bashing out of it. I’m not gonna even bother arguing with you on that issue here to avoid stooping to your levels. Politics are important, but there is a place and time for everything. As for the the topic at hand, Yes it is indeed very difficult to make a game, especially in 3D. I have seen people working on games before and just the coding alone can be immense, but what I think people are mainly complaining about is the fact that allot of games coming lately seem to all be using these “Minecraft style” textures. I personally don’t mind this style being used every once and a while, but I really don’t want it to turn into another trend where almost every 3D indie game has to be like this. That said this game does look interesting.

I’m hoping graphics whores die out so we can get back to focusing on the stuff that matters but who am I to say anything.

This lo-fi art style is because this is a game made by two guys. If you have some method of attaining high fidelity graphics on a shoestring budget and skeleton workforce, please reveal your knowledge – every game developer in the world wants to know.

They really should start getting some critique about using such huge voxels. There’s some insanely pretty tech demos of voxel engines with tiny voxels that run just fine on modern computers. Granted this game is from two indie dudes, so I guess they don’t have that much time and resources to use, but I too find it a bit annoying. Maybe EQNext will finally change how people view voxel games. Maybe.

I don’t mind the art-style per se, but it seems to have enabled the developers to go for a “lol Cthulhu” tone, rather than anything resembling creeping terror (the tone of the trailer pretty much confirms it), which is kind of the easy way out, tbh: The Lovecraft veneer but none of the substance.

I find that goes for anything Lovecraftian that wasn’t actually something written by Lovecraft himself. Not one person has managed to recreate the horror and unease that the man himself can distill in someone.

Don’t get me wrong. There are still plenty of good horror and weird writers out there. I meant when people try to use the Lovecraft lore or make a Lovecraft tale into a movie. They never actually capture why Lovecraft can be so fun to read.

Concept could be interesting, enemy models look a little too friendly for me but will certainly keep an eye on this, despite the music in the trailer sounding like it belongs to an 80’s sitcom about gypsies.

Cthulhu hates it more than you. Just think about it: you’re an ancient evil elder god with untold power, the merest glimpse of whom makes people gibberingly insane—and yet people mock you with things likes this or this.

The reason people like to use the Cthulhu mythos is because everything is literally(!!!!!) unimaginable so you don’t even have to imagine anything, just put some tentacles here and some slightly weird geometry there ET VOILAS! People will lap it up because Cthulhu.

I personally was a huge Lovecraft fan but over the years I’ve had so much “Lovecraftian” shit rammed down my throat from games developers that I could never enjoy any of his work again. You play the same damn record over and over again and you will begin to hate it. Thanks, games developers and your god damned ORIGINALITY.

I think one of the main reasons is simply that the mythos is now in the public domain. So developers can use aspects of it without fear of Lawyers That Should Not Be.

And in fairness we have has relatively few decent Cthulhu games really.

Cthulhu himself is just an attention whore anyway. It’s all about Yog-Sothoth. Nothing says cool like being a congeries of iridescent globes of hues which man cannot comprehend (basically a bluely-green colour with a hint of purple).

I thought it was faux-excitement, a sarcastic beginning to a below the cut evisceration.

It was real excitement. I’m stunned. Vaguely disappointed.

This is the sort of unimaginative rehashed silliness RPS rags on. Why isn’t it being snarkily laughed at? And it’s by supposed AAA guys. Big dev guys got their chance to make their big indie idea and it’s…. another minecraft knockoff and another roguelike-like. :/

I demand more snark and cynicism.

Oh, and I think it looks shit. Like an April Fools joke. The real announcement will come next week or something.>:p

I have to agree with a few remarks before mine: art style looks awfully uninspired i.e. it looks exactly as a Minecraft mod, lowpoly models are a OK, minecraft styled world is not – it looks too tired of a concept by now… I’d much prefer if they went all the way retro, making something Wolf3D like in the vein of Prelude of the Chambered…

+1 for the art style dislike – the low-fi, me-too Minecrafty look is beginning to grate on me the same way as all the indie and mobile games that use the same fucking pastel-coloured Flash-looking graphics.

So much hate. If you are a small developer and you want a randomly generated gameworld you can either go 2d, or the Minecraft style (if you don’t want to spend years and years on the game). I like the addition of the vibrant colors and low poly models, it makes the graphic style like an earlyer zelda game from the N64 times. I don’t have any problems with it, but than again I might be old.

It’s hard, because lot of what Minecraft does, it does for fairly solid technical-budget reasons. Cubes are a great easy 3D space abstraction (although if you’re not doing arbitrary landscaping, jump the rails at this point and go do some other low-fi style, absolutely; see the entire late ’90s). Low-res textures fit better with low-poly geometry, and are easier to draw since the technical constraints crush out your artistic ones (there’s not enough detail to get stuff wrong). And you want to show them big and pixelly with nearest-neighbour sampling, because if you try to bi/trilinearly filter textures like that, you’re just going to make smeary mush.

Minecraft then absolutely glomps onto the “cuboids” style and makes its mobs out of them, which gives it good thematic consistency and, again, a lot of fake technical limitation that hides artistic talent constraints. Games that put more detailed models into a cube world end up looking odd from the juxtaposition of detail between the two.

If all you need is arbitrary destruction/random levels, though, you can still round off cubes at points by having variants depending on adjacency. You can make the cubes smaller than half a person, too, since it won’t matter if they’re fiddly to target individual ones. This then means you can get away with further variation elsewhere.

You know, I understand that it’s easier that way, but I’m also quite sure it’s possible to mess around with textures in Photoshop a bit to achieve something that looks decent and doesn’t scream Minecraft when you look at it. Even if it looked smudgy or whatever, just with at least a bit of its own character to it.

I think it’s less about the fact that it’s randomly generated and more about the ability to destroy the levels (as seen in the trailer). That’s a lot easier to do with the clear boundaries of blocks, from a technical as well as a gameplay standpoint. And having blockbased levels but highly detailed textures is always a jarring experience for me (see high-def mods for Minecraft)

I like the addition of the vibrant colors and low poly models, it makes the graphic style like an earlyer zelda game from the N64 times.

Call me odd, but that was actually my least favorite period of gaming history. The early poly era had so many blocky forms and bad textures. I much prefer tight pixels or PS2/Xbox/Unreal Engine 2 era graphics over the previous generation’s style.

I would say part of why Half-Life was good because it felt much more ‘solid’ than its contemporaries. It’s amazing to look back and see how 3D models and geometry changed in such a short period. In terms of progress, the late 2000s seem like dark ages, by comparison.

Yup, Spelunky with hand made levels would be a short affair about learning the optimum path, finishing the game in 4-5 hrs and probably never playing it again. The random generation gives the game enormous variety.

But if you’re generation algorithm is good then the end result should be good level design. Take Dwarf Fortress for example. Their world generation algorithm is great and it produces fairly good worlds with good climate distribution, etc, etc.

Looks fun! Both gameplay and graphics. I smile at all the “tired of Minecraft graphics” comments. Just looks like fun, low res stuff developed by two dudes to me. Though I’ve never played Minecraft, which may be why I can’t tire of all the apparent graphic inspired games. MWHAHAHAHAH!!!

I’m a big huge Lovecraft and Dishonored fan but it’s kind of uncanny how brutally turned off i get from that art style. I just don’t know, there isn’t anything intrinsically bad about it, but I have seen so many games that ape that style that I can’t help but feel it’s a copycat maneuver.

It’s not even that it’s blocky and lo-fi, it’s that it’s literally the same art style, big pixelly textures, world fog and all. I would have loved to see this simplicity executed with some actual flair, at the very least with some creative post processing, or ANYTHING really.

I still gave it my vote on Greenlight. But man… Enough with the Minecraft aping already.

I don’t mind the Minecraft art style that much — seems an odd choice for an FPS, but hell, what do I know? — but given how much they’re waving their inspirations all over the place, it seems _really_ odd they’re not acknowledging MC (or, hell, Infiniminer if they prefer).

It makes it feel skeezy, like they think that if they don’t mention it, we’re all WAY too stupid to notice.